I Swear, If He’s Lost Inside That MP3 Again…
Posted on January 26, 2005
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Well, back to normal, I’ve got an addition to the site to comment briefly on. Unfortunately, none of you will ever see it since it’s all backend stuff (I know what you’re thinking, shush). I just finished (I think) implementing a couple of pages that allow me to update the site without actually having to login to my server management stuff and editing the database directly. If I want to edit an update, I’ll still have to do that for now. I can live with that, I think.
I’ve been on a tear since my last update. I think I’ve watched the entire first season - 23 episodes - of NCIS since then. I knew the show was good, but man, it’s become one of my favorites. I watched the last episode of season 1 right after moving back home after graduation and it was good enough that I started watching season 2 this past fall without having a clue what had happened in the first season. I had the opportunity to watch the first season and took advantage. Quite a good show. Very funny. Think CSI with more humor.
I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do about a job. I went to a job fair this morning to talk to the people from Colonial Life on the recommendation of someone that my grandma knows. Turns out all they had at the job fair was their sales department. The first thing they said to me was “Are you interested in a career in sales?” I replied “Not so much.” But they did at least refer me to their home office so I’ll be going by there to drop off a resume sometime in the next few days. I’m beginning to think that I’m never going to find a job. I just can’t turn up anything.
The job fair, however, did provide a couple of positives. While I was at Dutch Square, I noticed that the EB Games was right there in the area where the fair was. Not a week ago, I talked to April on AIM and she said she was working at the EB in Dutch Square. Sure enough… Let me tell you what, it sure was good to talk to a truly pro-Clemson person and even more so, a friend that’s my age. Talking to my buddies on AIM is one thing, but after several months, it sure was nice to talk to someone from Clemson. Here in coot central. Good times. And being at EB, I got the skinny on some games I’m looking forward to. KOTOR 2 for PC… *drool* Soon. Like 3 weeks. Forza Motorsport for Xbox… *big sadface* I heard an ugly rumor on the internet the other day about an April 1st release and was hoping that it was just an early April Fool’s joke, but no… it wasn’t. It was worse. May! Friggin’ May. Ever since I discovered that Forza was in production, I’ve been salivating. It was a big shock to find out that I won’t be able to play it until May. I did, however, get to check out the in-store demo of the game and it was even playable. How could I resist taking the Ferrari 360 for a few laps around Laguna Seca? Yeah, I couldn’t. It’s going to be quite a big adjustment from playing PGR to playing Forza.
Well, I think I’ve managed to write a bit more than I thought I was going to be able to write when I sat down. The last few days have been rather mundane. Ah, well, here’s to hoping that the new updating “software” works 
Don’t Fold Your Mascot!
Posted on January 25, 2005
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k, I agree with Nathan. Networking is a huge misnomer. There’s nothing about it that works the first time. Ever. Computers in general, for that matter. Last weekend, my server had 2 hard drives, a CD-RW, a floppy drive, and an 802.11b wireless card. Now it has 3 hard drives, a CD-RW, and an 802.11g wireless card. Of course the new hard drive might be a bad unit and the wireless card is sketchy. *sigh* My sister also now has my dad’s old computer and she had the 11b wireless card from my server, but that of course didn’t work. She couldn’t get more than 1Mbps when the card is only 15 feet from my router. So my dad ended up buying another 11g card and putting that in her computer and now she gets 54Mbps. No idea why. We also spent a good 45 minutes finally getting around to securing our wireless network. We’ve been seeing several other networks around lately (skippy and manitou, who are you?) so we figured it was finally time to lock ours down. Good stuff.
I acquired some good things to watch this week. I finally got a copy of L?on and watched that. Good stuff. I’d been wanting to see it for a long time and it definitely delivered. Much more so than the two previous anticipated movies I watched. Those would be none other than Heat and Lawrence of Arabia, believe it or not. They were good, but way too drawn out and I got a little bored watching them. Blasphemy, I know. L?on held my attention the whole time. It was funny to see a young Natalie Portman, too. She actually had a rather good performance and was probably better than the work she’s done in Star Wars.
I finally got the Enzo. I started playing Project Gotham 2 again a couple weeks ago and after getting back to where I was on my brother’s Xbox (that’s my main gripe about the Xbox outside of its enormosity; you can save stuff directly to the system, which is nice, but to take your game anywhere else, you gotta drop another $30 to buy a memory card), I made it all the way up to the Ultimate series. Ferrari Enzos, Porsche Carrera GTs, Pagani Zondas, Ford GTs, and more make for some exciting races. I had quite the battle with two Koenigsegg CCs last night. Of course, at the time, I mistook them for Carerra GTs. Hey, they’re similar, and at 200mph, what the other car looks like doesn’t so much matter as where it is. Playing the game again has also made me realize what a sweet soundtrack the game has. Off the top of my head, there’s tracks by TRUSTcompany, The Used, and Earshot in the game. And there’s several other tracks that are good that I don’t know what they are. Playing PGR2 while waiting for Forza (which has been pushed back to April 
) has been a perfectly enjoyable experience and I’m quite tempted to go buy PGR1 and play that as well. My brother’s played it at a friend’s house and said they two games are almost identical outside of tracks and probably cars. Fine by me.
So I finally got around to cleaning up my laptop. I formatted the OS/program partition the other night and reinstalled Windows. I then cleaned up my storage drive by deleting a few things that I never used and copied stuff that I didn’t want to delete over to my desktop, and then defragged the drive. So now I’ve got a nice, clean Windows install, and a zippy (as zippy as 4200rpm can be, anyway) storage drive again. Is good.
No major updates to the site to comment on this time, hehe. We’ll see what I can come up with to do now. Although I really should let planetsuper just coast and work on content for it so I can work up the design for the Ideas site that Chris and I are planning.
What Kind Of Monster Pops Someone Else’s Bubble Wrap?
Posted on January 15, 2005
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Well, I think the front page is pretty much back to normal. The comments are working again and I don’t think they’ll be as easy to break as they were when I first wrote the code for them. You guys should be able to use quotation marks now, haha. So do that. Comments are fun! And stuff. I also jacked Kyle’s idea for an update archive. I’d been meaning to make an archive for a while but my idea was more along the lines of have the front page be limited to 5 or 10 posts and then have the archive be a giant list of posts and maybe separate it up into chunks. Kyle’s implementation on his site is quite nice and it’s duplicated here. The front page is now limited to the five most recent posts and at the bottom of the page is a link to the archive. Click that and you’ll get a list of all the update titles. Click the title you want to read and you’ll get a page with just that post on it. I also went back and added retroactive comments so you can still comment on old posts and view old comments. Enjoy.
Those two things have kind of been my main focus as far as working on the site is concerned the last few days. I think it’s pretty much to the point now where I can really just let it coast and concentrate on adding content and maybe trying to drum up some more readers of not only the front page, but also the forums. Now that I’ve got a real host with ample storage and bandwidth, I think I’m ready to take on more users and get some more action. I’m not really sure of the best way to do that, though. Chandra’s already responsible for probably 50% of the registered users on the site so I think that resource may be tapped out. I’ve got link to the site in my AIM profile but I don’t think that’s generated any traffic at all. Hrms. Don’t think the link in my sig at AnandTech has done much, either. I guess I can’t really force people to use the site, though…
Well, that’s pretty much the news for now. Add comments, test it out, let me know how it works, and as always, thanks for reading and enjoy the site
You Say One Word And I’ll Flush Your Goldfish!
Posted on January 13, 2005
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Well, this has been a long time coming. I realized the other day that I hadn’t updated since Christmas Eve and now that I’m on my new host, what better time?
About the new host… For the past month or so - a little longer than the forums have been in existence, more or less - I’d been hosting planetsuper on my own server using my own space and bandwidth. Probably not the best idea, but it worked and it allowed me to get the forums running. So now I’m officially moved to the new host and working on getting everything set up. First order of business was the forums, which are now located in their own spiffmatic subdomain, forums.planetsuper.com. Much easier to remember and it just plain looks better. After that, I made sure that all of my internal linking was working - the menu on each page, etc. Next up was this front page, which got b0rked when I moved hosts. It had been running on text files because until about a month ago, I’d been unable to get MySQL working on my server. That changed when the forums were installed but I never got around to converting the front page to MySQL. With the new host comes a few changes and the front page is now database-driven once again. I must say, it’s good to be back to the database instead of text files. One last thing that needs to be rewritten is the update comments for each update. Those are still in text files and aren’t functioning right now, so I just stripped them completely from the layout. I’ll be rewriting the code so you guys can leave me comments (and hopefully they won’t get b0rked when people use quotation marks like they did with the text files, hehe) sometime in the next day or so. Maybe tomorrow or maybe later tonight, we’ll see. I think that pretty much covers the news as far as the site itself goes and I’ll go ahead and just end the update as whole right here. Enjoy the new site, folks